Brooklyn Academy of Music Chooses New President

The Brooklyn Academy of Music hasn’t had to search for a new president in a very long time. Since the impresario Harvey Lichtenstein stepped down in 1999, Karen Brooks Hopkins has held the position, becoming a fund-raising powerhouse and building the institution into an anchor for a cultural renaissance in Downtown Brooklyn.

On Thursday, the academy is to announce that Ms. Hopkins’s successor will be Katy Clark, the president and executive director of New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s, a 40-year-old classical ensemble made up of top freelance musicians.

Ms. Clark, 46, who has run St. Luke’s for four years, was by no means an obvious choice. The orchestra is a modest institution devoted to a single discipline that performs in a variety of places, like Carnegie Hall and Caramoor. The academy is a multidisciplinary operation that presents drama, film and music on its own campus with three separate stages and a cinema complex. The academy’s $54 million annual budget dwarfs the orchestra’s $6.5 million one.

But the academy’s chairman, Alan H. Fishman, said it has never sought to play it safe, even in making a decision as important as who is going to lead a major cultural institution into its next chapter.

“We were inevitably going to end up with someone from a smaller organization because we wanted fierce entrepreneurial ownership, which has been BAM’s signature forever,” he said. “We’ll figure out the scale thing along with her — I’m not worried about that so much.”

“It became pretty clear that we were not going to find a person from a mini BAM ready to come,” Mr. Fishman added, referring to the complexity of the academy’s operations and its unconventional presentations. “What are we going to do? You know there ain’t a lot of BAMs out there.”

Ms. Clark said she recognized that she would be a leader on a much larger stage. (She also stands to earn considerably more — her pay package in fiscal year 2013 was about $172,000, according to the orchestra’s most recent public tax filing, compared with Ms. Hopkins’s $422,000).

But she said she felt confident in her management and fund-raising abilities.

“The scale is humbling — it is an organization with enormous range,” she said. “I’m up to the challenge, that’s for certain.”

Though it performs elsewhere, St. Luke’s does own its own home, the DiMenna Center for Classical Music. Made up of four floors of a nine-story building on Manhattan’s Far West Side, it includes administrative offices and rehearsal space and has provided Ms. Clark with some experience in operating a physical plant.

Artistically, she has been credited with elevating St. Luke’s into a group that The New York Times described as “an ensemble to watch” under the leadership of a music director Ms. Clark appointed, Pablo Heras-Casado.

And Mr. Fishman said that directing an orchestra at a time when so many are financially endangered is a true management training exercise. “If you can successfully run an emergent classical music organization, you can probably pretty much do anything,” he said.

One important role for Ms. Clark, who starts at the end of June when Ms. Hopkins steps down, will be that of fund-raiser, since 60 percent of the academy’s budget comes from donations. Mr. Fishman said he was impressed by Ms. Clark’s efforts in that area at St. Luke’s.

She started at St. Luke’s as development director in 2005 and led the orchestra’s $50 million campaign to build the DiMenna Center, which opened in 2011 on West 37th Street.

Born and raised in Wales, Ms. Clark started out as a professional musician, playing violin in the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London from 1994 to 1999. She earned a history degree at Cambridge, a master’s degree in violin performance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a certificate in arts management at Birkbeck College, University of London.

“I always had an eye out for management,” she said. “I was curious about the orchestra world and how it worked.”

From 2001 to 2004, Ms. Clark led the Philadelphia chapter of the American Composers Forum, which gives money to composers. She is also an alumna of the League of American Orchestras’ orchestral management fellowship program.

Ms. Clark said it was too early to discuss her specific plans for the academy.

“BAM is this organization that has always had this restless curiosity, and I feel that too,” she said. “The sky’s the limit. It’s an organization that doesn’t set boundaries for itself and that’s enormously appealing these days because many organizations talk more cautiously.”

Ms. Clark plans to move to Brooklyn from Washington Heights, where she lives with her husband, David Moody, and their two children, ages 12 and 16.

As for the academy’s mandate for Ms. Clark, it is seeking to continue to emphasize education and is planning construction projects that include BAM South, new movie theaters topped by a residential tower.

“We want to keep pushing it and we wanted somebody who was going to take the ownership of that rather than administrate an existing pile of assets,” Mr. Fishman said. “Everybody wants to be BAM — we know that. We need to be five steps ahead of the world.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Brooklyn Academy of Music Chooses New President. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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